Load a PDF in Windows Store App (8.1 & UWP)

I’m working on a project where users are going to load a PDF, but will be returning to the same PDF again and again. I was having some problems with Microsoft’s normally amazing PDF showcase application on lower end devices (my app needs to run well on an original Surface), so I tested this solution out.

So far it’s working really well. The navigation is clean and fast, loading times are great, even for PDFs that are upwards of 100 pages.

The downsides are

the initial “processing” time (splitting the pages up and saving them as images) is a little costly. For my larger PDFs, it can take 90-120 seconds on a Surface 1. But once the PDF is split into individual images, loading is very fast.

I’m missing things like page zooming, semantic zoom. If that is something that matters, check out the showcase application above.